The Long Game

In the early to mid-eighties in New York, being part of the downtown rock community involved a tangible commitment to extremity. If you hadn’t broken songs into a handful of pieces and forgotten to put them back together (DNA), you had detuned your guitars (Glenn Branca, Rhys Chatham, and Sonic Youth), or maybe you worked with all of these strategies and threw in some physical confrontation for good measure (James Chance and Swans). We can argue about who made the biggest impact over time—the easy money for influence on traditional rock music goes to Sonic Youth—but it turns out that the longest and most interesting career arc may belong to Swans.

The band, led by founding member Michael Gira, has just released a limited-edition, double-live CD called “Not Here/Not Now,” the sales of which will fund its next studio album. This form of crowd-funding is a method that Gira has been using successfully for years with his Young God record label. Farming out little of the work, Gira helps assemble the packages; for $500, he will even write a song with the “customer’s name in the song, praising the customer, his or her ancestors, thoughts, dreams, and future or past lives, forever.” If there is a single principle that has kept Swans alive and relevant through some odd patches, it may be the idea of farming nothing out and simply working, working, and working until something emerges. In 2013, a band composed of men in their forties and fifties is one of the most fearsome working live bands, with a healthy following of twenty-somethings who weren’t alive when Gira was jumping off the stage and confronting audience members. (He’s not exactly a cuddly m.c. now, but the first row is safe from being tackled.) In 2012, Pitchfork voted Swans’ convulsive double CD “The Seer” No. 5 out of the fifty best albums of the year. Swans has long since lost the feeling of being some kind a comeback unit working the reunion circuit. It’s here now, making your band look weak.

In 2010, when I wrote a column about the group, Gira had just returned to the idea of Swans, resurrecting the name and putting aside the slightly less intense work that he’d been doing alone, and with a band called Angels of Light. He had already established Young God as a viable label, not just a vanity project, by putting out acts like Devendra Banhart. For Swans, Gira recruited the original guitarist, Norm Westberg, as well as the percussionist Thor Harris, the lap-steel guitarist Christoph Hahn, the drummer Phil Puleo, and the bassist Chris Pravdica. He resurrected the fundamental brutality of Swans and expanded the instrumental palette, and the result fit uncannily well into the context of younger bands. Swans uses repetition, force, and rejection of any easy pleasure, though it leaves room for plangent sounds and vocal melodies amid a sprawling, furious catharsis arranged by consent. “Intensity” is a word that should be used carefully after seeing a Swans show.

In the band’s latest set, the opening is a long, trembling, cresting, and falling chord that sounds something like sonic sea spray. (The band would likely never stoop to methods like smoke machines or strobe lights, so it creates its own special effects.) Gira, who often wears a cowboy hat and looks like a farmer who has not seen a good crop in a while, is over six feet tall and conducts the band, cuing changes with his eyes and head. (When V Magazine recently presented him as part of its “legends of punk” series, he wore his uncle’s suit and refused any styling.) His voice is a menacing baritone, so it’s unsettling when he opens a set by intoning, “To be kind” repeatedly, almost tenderly. Soon enough, the band erupts into a blitz of noise, and sets up rhythms that don’t so much drive songs as drive them into the earth. There are passages of acoustic guitar and stretches of resonant vibraphone bowing and clarinet; the sets don’t seek monochromatic endurance as much as total focus and the completion of an assignment that they’ve devised for themselves, perhaps unconsciously: What is the strongest effect any instrument can have? How far can any idea be taken without becoming parody?

Over the past three years, I’ve seen half a dozen Swans shows, most recently at Warsaw, in Brooklyn, in June. What I heard in that set was fairly close to what is on “Not Here/Not Now.” Over time, Gira and I had conversations in person, via Skype, and at his house in upstate New York, where Nikola Tamindzic took the portrait you see here. (Gira has since moved, to be closer to his kids.) He sets out chips and salsa just like regular folk. Despite being one of the most imposing figures in rock, and sometimes just terrifying, he is never anything but polite offstage, and answers even annoying questions with an attention to detail.

The following is an edited and condensed version of our conversations, the latest conducted yesterday. Gira wrote that he is “sleepless, and working on new album in Texas.”

So, how did we get here, more or less?

We released an album in 2012, “The Seer,” that garnered more attention than anything Swans has ever done in its thirty-plus-year history. I was a bit disturbed by the scrutiny—creeped out, in fact—so as we toured over the last year, we quickly began to discard any music from that album during our set, replacing it with new material that we’d mutate in front of our audience. By the end of the tour, only a half of one song from “The Seer” remained, the entire set being unrecorded material. The audience seemed to levitate along with us on our journey to ecstasy, so I believe our instincts were correct. We’re now embarking on a new album, recording, orchestrating, and mangling the above-mentioned material, and I very much look forward to leaving that material behind as well, once the album is finished and we begin touring again.

Why do think this version of the band has connected so easily with people (even if “easily” seems like the wrong word here)?

Well, we’re the best. [Laughs] I figure, it’s serendipitous in that the nefarious Internet has primed a lot of young folks to discover us. And people who have a proclivity for what we do have discovered us as a result, and I guess the reputation has grown rather than diminished over the years. And then we supplied the meat. We didn’t just come out and do old shit, which is fully non-interesting to me.

Was there a moment that stood out in the life of this band, after you started playing again as Swans in 2010—a moment when you knew something was happening and might continue to happen?

I think that it was pretty soon after we started playing. Once we started getting out of the notion of replicating songs from a record, and making something into its own experience live, letting things grow and change and actually evolve completely away from where they started, then it really felt like something, because now we were very intuitive. You saw that “Toussaint L’ouverture” song? That’s me sort of conducting these waves of sound, you know? And that’s a lot of connection between us.

I think my ultimate nightmare would be playing to a bunch of potbellied guys in black shirts, black T-shirts. It’s really nice seeing a lot of young people. It feels vital and alive, as opposed to kind of, six beers on, or something.

About twenty years ago, I was obsessed with the live album “Public Castration Is a Good Idea.” I didn’t understand what the band was trying to do, and it was a confusion that I liked. That version of the band sounded like the inverse of this band. On “Castration,” it was like you wanted the songs to dissolve.

I haven’t listened to that record in about twenty years, probably, but last time I did, it sounded incredibly slow. I couldn’t believe it. It was just like you could smoke a cigarette between beats, basically. I think I’m going to make a “Public Castration Is a Good Idea” children’s shirt.

With all the physical and emotional intensity at play, are you ever worried about people leaving the band?

There is always the problem of, to put it mildly, my mercurial temper. I get so wrapped up in it that I’ll scream at people onstage, and it’s not cool. After I do it, I’m like, ‘Why the fuck did I do that?,’ but I do it again. It’s just that someone’s not remembering a part, or maybe I just try to goad them into pushing more, and that upsets some people. I don’t blame them. I’m working on it. [Laughs] But I do think that it [claps] brings out something in people, to be under such intense scrutiny.

It seems like the point is to not present anything like other shows.

I don’t know about that, but it’s definitely trying to reach a higher place.

Has anyone ever left the band because it got too intense?

Oh yeah, sure. Lots of people. [Laughs] But I’m much less hard than I used to be. These fellows are my friends, and I like them immensely. When we’re onstage, it’s a battle, but not between them and myself. Just to pull the potential out of music takes a lot of commitment, physically and psychically. In a way, it’s just about performing, and I don’t mean reciting—I mean really being inside of it.

It gets loud, to put it mildly. When you can’t hear each other, what do you do?

There are a lot of moments like that. We use lot of eye contact. That’s the way. The way the stage is arranged is intentional, so I’m hearing everything. It’s sort of a loose horseshoe shape, and I’m right in the middle of it, and that’s to limit the necessity for monitors. We don’t have our own monitor man… So I just have a kick, snare, and my voice, and the monitors and I get everything else from everybody else. Norman, I think, is kind of lost in the wasteland over there sometimes.

When you started, in the eighties, the press was focused so much on the hostility, or the perceived hostility, of the band.

I would say that the first stage of Swans was hostile. We started to have an audience that came sort of wanting what we did toward the end, I suppose. But in the early days, it was either hostile or indifferent. I mean, if there were twenty people in the audience, by the time we were done, there were five. And they’d just kind of yell at us and then leave. They threw shit, too. But then we went through another stage where we started to do quieter things as well. We had started to then draw people who wanted this kind of lunkheaded version that they read about in the press. And then we started to do quieter things, and introduced [the singer-songwriter] Jarboe into the mix, where she was singing, and people hated that. Those people hated that. It was very divisive, and she endured a lot as a result.

And now we’re here. What’s next?

I’m gonna go through the herculean task of making more of these handmade CDs and redoing our live CD to raise money for the recording of the next thing for which there is material now. There’s enough. And then we’ll go on and record that with the band, and then I’ll probably hack away at it for several months and orchestrate and add quiet tones and do some other things, just for the sake of making it into a film. And we’ll see what happens.

Does everyone live in New York?

Christoph lives in Berlin. Thor lives in Austin. And Phil lives in New Jersey. Norman lives in Manhattan, and Chris lives in Brooklyn. But it’s okay. I fly people in for rehearsals, and then…

Berlin is basically part of Brooklyn anyway, so…

[Laughs] It is, sort of. When I moved to New York, in 1979, I got a nine-hundred-square-foot storefront on Sixth [Street] and [Avenue] B that I had to gut and build myself to make habitable, but that only cost me a hundred bucks a month. Of course, I had to kill a lot of rats. And I cut it up. It was half Swans rehearsal space, and half where I lived. I don’t miss that. No wonder I was hostile. [Laughs]